Open Season (Luc Vanier)

by Peter Kirby

  “Marie-Anne, I said, it’s business.”

  “Inspector, I can’t talk to you if you don’t buy a dance. The boss will be all over me.”

  “How much?”

  “For you, thirty. Special price for my favourite policeman. I’ll be back.”

  She put the tray on the table and walked off. He couldn’t help watching her leave, and she knew it. She came back with a white pedestal table and pushed Vanier’s legs apart with her foot to make room for it. She pushed the table between his legs and climbed up, leaning forward to rest her hands on his shoulders, waiting for the next song to start. Vanier tried not to look at her breasts.

  “So what do you want to talk about, Inspector? And did I ever tell you that you get me hot?”

  “Eastern Europeans. Eastern European prostitutes.”

  The music started and she began to dance.

  “You mean like Russians? You like Russian girls? I thought you liked me.” She moved her hands over her breasts, and down past her hips to let them rest on her thighs, all the while looking him in the eyes.

  “Not just Russians. From that part of the world, could be Ukrainians, Belarusians. Do you see Eastern European girls working?”

  He was keeping eye contact deliberately, and she was enjoying it. She reached behind and unclasped her skimpy top, pulling it free, her breasts inches from Vanier’s mouth.

  “I don’t see them dancing, if that’s what you mean. You know, they’re not in clubs like this.” She turned away from him and bent low, looking back at him through her legs. She held her ankles and slowly pulled her hands up the back of her legs, still keeping eye contact, still smiling. “They don’t have the people skills. Most of them don’t even speak English or French.”

  “But they’re working in Montreal?”

  She turned to face him again, bending low and moving her hands up from her waist to her breasts, pushing them towards Vanier’s mouth. “Oh sure. But only special markets.”

  “Marie-Anne, can’t you just tell me what you know, instead of me having to drag it out of you? What’s the story on Eastern European sex workers in Montreal?”

  She smiled, held her right breast up and bent to lick the nipple slowly. She stopped licking and leaned in.

  “Men are shit, Inspector. You know that. And there are all kinds of shits. The ones that come here, they like beauty, the kind you find in the magazines. The best looking girls in high school, and the kind they could never have, and never will have. But we smile at them, take our clothes off for them, lie to them about how great they are. They own us for a few minutes and then go back to their apartments and jack off on that for however long the memories last.”

  She closed her hand in a fist and moved it back and forth in a lewd pantomime.

  “I get it,” said Vanier.

  “Other guys prefer older women, someone like a friend’s mother or some high-school teacher they had a crush on way back when. There are places for that too. There are the races. You like black girls? Asians? Spanish girls? You name it, there are places to find it. Then there are the massage parlours, the swingers’ clubs, and the escort services, where you order whatever you want, like a pizza. Down at the bottom, there are the street workers who will give a blow job in an alleyway for whatever they can get.”

  She stood up, grabbed the waist of her short skirt and pulled it down. All that was left was the tall latex boots that came to mid-thigh, and boy-style red panties that accentuated the curve of her cheeks.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Of course I do, Inspector. The boss will wonder, otherwise.”

  Her breasts were a teenage fantasy, silicone reinventing evolution. She leaned in until they were an inch from his mouth, whispered in his ear. “Then there are the special needs.”

  “Special needs?”

  “Special needs, Inspector. I told you all men are shit, right?”

  “Yeah. I got that.”

  “The special needs are the real shits. They’re the ones who didn’t grow up with normal fantasies from an underwear catalogue. Normal doesn’t do it for them. They need something forbidden. Men who like children, men who like to hurt women. The scum.”

  She turned her back to him and bent low, slowly lowering her panties, sliding them carefully over the red boots. She kicked them off, and straightened up and turned to lean both hands on his shoulders.

  She leaned in, close to his ear. “They import girls from Eastern Europe for those people. Whatever perverted fantasy you have, save up your money and you can have it delivered. The European women are the specialist import and you can have one of your own, to do whatever you want.” She pulled back from Vanier. Stood up, looking him in the eyes.

  “Put your clothes on.”

  She had stopped smiling.

  “Any names?”

  She leaned forward. “No names. It’s just what I hear. What we girls talk about now and then. You want to know more, why don’t you talk to that woman that runs Protect, Diana Prince. She should be able to tell you more. If she talks to you, that is. I hear she doesn’t like police that much.”

  “Thanks, Marie-Anne.”

  “You want another drink? Another dance?” She was playing with her breasts as she talked. “Maybe I could do you a special price, Inspector. You make me very hot.”

  Vanier grinned. “No thanks.” The music had stopped. There was a girl wearing nothing but thigh-high red latex boots standing on a pedestal between his legs, fondling her breasts.

  That’s when the camera flash went off.

  “Shit,” said Vanier, jumping to his feet. The cameraman was out the door before Vanier could reach him. Vanier was on the street just in time to see the man pulling the passenger door closed on a red Toyota as it pulled out into traffic.

  Ten

  It had been a long night. At two o’clock, Katya thought it was over, until her door burst open and Pavlov stumbled in. He had been drinking. Now he was drunk, slurring his words. But he didn’t need words to tell her what he wanted. He undid his pants and stood in front of her. She reached forward to fondle him, but no matter how hard she tried, it didn’t work. Pavlov swore, blamed her for his softness. He pulled his pants back on, and she lay back on the bed. He slipped his belt off and wound it around his hand. As it lashed again and again across her breasts, Katya grunted, biting her lip. She knew better than to cry out. He stopped with the belt, pulled her up to a sitting position with a fistful of hair, and delivered a hard punch to the side of her head, where the bruising wouldn’t show too much. He let go of her and she dropped back onto the bed. He punched her once more, in her stomach, before staggering out the door. He pulled the door closed behind him. Through the haze of pain, Katya listened for the key in the lock. She heard nothing.

  It takes time for hope to die, but its death can be liberating. Hope keeps us going in the bleakest of times, defying logic and evidence. It stops you from lying down and waiting for your heart to stop beating. When you’ve lost hope, you’re free.

  Katya had known for weeks there was no way out, that she would never be allowed to walk away. She was going to be used until she lost her value and that would be the end of it. She had always thought about escape, but she knew it was stupid. They would catch her before she even had a chance to get out the window, and even if she did get out the window, she would fall five floors to the ground and die, or worse still, she would fall and only get injured. And they would bring her back.

  She had gone through any number of scenarios, and none had a happy ending. In the end, escape meant nothing. She was illegal in Canada. She knew no one, and would be deported. If she stayed where she was, she was going to die, and if she escaped, the best that could happen was that she would be sent back to Ukraine, and they would find her and kill her. Staying or leaving, it was all the same. If death was inevitable, nothing mattered.

&
nbsp; When Pavlov left, she knew at once that he had forgotten to lock the door. She made a decision. The fire escape in the hallway was padlocked, but there was a window about three metres past the fire exit that wasn’t screwed shut. She had seen it every time she walked by. She was sure it would open.

  She waited on the bed for two hours, listening intently for the slightest sound. When she was convinced that everyone was asleep, she got up and checked the door. She went back to the bed and reached under the mattress. She had found her passport three weeks ago in a drawer and taken it back. No one had noticed it was gone. She slipped it into her bra and turned back to the door. It opened soundlessly. She slipped out into the dark hallway, stopped and listened again. Nothing but four-in-the-morning silence, a silence that made her breathing sound loud.

  She moved slowly down the hallway, sticking close to the wall, past the emergency exit, until she was in front of the casement window. It was chest-high and looked out over the parking lot five floors down. She reached up and pulled at the latch that held the two panes together. It opened with a soft click. It sounded like a sigh of relief. The two panes swung open. Katya leaned out quickly to grab them before they swung all the way out and hit the wall. One at a time, she let each one rest against the wall as she breathed in the night air, looking down to the asphalt—the only thing that would break her fall.

  Just below the window was a four-inch ledge that wound around the building. If she could hang onto it for about three metres, she could make it to the fire escape. She kicked off her shoes and threw them out the window, listening for the sound of them hitting the ground below. It took longer than she expected. Then she struggled up into the window frame and sat astride the opening. She leaned out and rested her foot on the ledge, using the support to pull her other leg out of the window. With both feet balancing on the ledge and her hands clutching the window frame, she shifted her weight and brought her right hand down to the ledge. Then she took her right foot off the ledge, letting it hang in the air. She braced herself and took her left foot off the ledge, hanging with one hand on the window and the other on the ledge. She braced again and let go of the window frame. She was hanging by one hand. Pain shot through her fingers and right arm until she managed to grab hold of the ledge with her left hand. She took a deep breath and started to move towards the fire escape, releasing one hand, moving it forward, then grasping again, doing the same with the other hand. It felt like hours, but in only a few minutes she was standing on the fire escape.

  She stood there for a moment and contemplated the fire escape. Every shuffle made noise, no matter how careful she was. She started walking down. About ten feet above the parking lot, the last segment of the staircase jutted out horizontally, far above the ground. It was weighted, the bottom of the staircase high up in the air so that it couldn’t be accessed from the parking lot. You had to stand on it to make it drop.

  She put her foot on the first rung and felt her weight counterbalancing the staircase like a see-saw. As she inched out along the staircase, it began to descend slowly to the parking lot. When she was halfway down, an electrical contact was broken, and an alarm high up on the wall of the building shredded the silence with an electronic siren. The staircase was suddenly ablaze in light. She lurched forward, forcing the staircase down to the asphalt with a loud clash. When she stepped off the bottom rung, the counterbalance snapped the last section of the staircase back into the air with a loud crash of steel on steel.

  Katya looked around for her shoes, grabbed them and started running barefooted away from the noise and light. She didn’t know where she was going, just that she had to put distance between the building and herself. She hadn’t thought any further than getting away from the building, and now she had no idea what to do other than run as far as she could. She turned right out of the parking lot and made some quick choices, staying away from well-lit areas, from streets with traffic. Keep to the shadows. Hide from everyone.

  After half an hour, she realized she was travelling in a big circle, passing the same places time after time. She kept running.

  The sun was already coming up and lights were turning on in the houses she passed. When she caught a glimpse of a man in a window scratching himself awake, she knew she had to find somewhere to hide. She was walking barefooted in a skimpy red dress that screamed hooker.

  She ran down an alley lined on both sides with garden sheds and small fences. She started trying the doors on the sheds. The sixth door opened with a creaking noise, and she slipped inside, closing it quickly behind her. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. One wall was lined with wide shelves. The floor beneath the lowest shelf was empty except for two plastic bags of soil. She got down on her hands and knees, pushed the bags aside to make space, and crawled under the shelf, pulling the bags back into place after her.

  After fifteen minutes she began to relax. In thirty, she was asleep.

  Eleven

  Vanier’s first stop was at the local convenience store for a coffee. He sipped the coffee while leafing through a copy of the Journal de Montréal under the hand-scrawled Vous lisez, vous achetez‼ sign. The photograph from the strip club was relegated to page six, and given only a quarter of a page with a small caption, On ne Peut pas Dérober la Vérité. He closed the paper without buying a copy. If his photo had only made it to page six, it wasn’t a big deal. He just hoped Anjili didn’t see it.

  The squad room was quiet; people had their heads down in concentration, or were staring, fully absorbed, at their computer screens. They were as obvious as a classroom full of fourteen-year-olds waiting for a substitute teacher to fall into some juvenile trap.

  Someone had cut out the Journal de Montréal story and pinned it to the notice board. Vanier made a show of stopping to read. He leaned forward to get a better look at the picture, felt a dozen eyes on his back. “Not the best likeness,” he mumbled, turning away.

  He carried his coffee over to his desk and sat down. “It was work. I was interviewing a source.”

  “Next time, take me with you,” Laurent said.

  Vanier’s phone rang. He put it to his ear. “Vanier.”

  “Inspector Vanier. It’s Madame Cantin.”

  The police chief’s assistant, though assistant was the wrong word. Handler, keeper, watchdog, protector—all better described what she did. “Good morning, Madame Cantin. What can I do for you?”

  “The Chief would like to see you, Inspector. About an article in today’s paper.” Even though she was only booking an appointment, her voice still managed to convey deep personal disapproval.

  “Okay. I’m coming up.”

  “No. Not immediately. Chief Bédard is busy all morning. He asked if you could be available at two o’clock.”

  Vanier accepted. If he couldn’t figure out a way to avoid the two o’clock, he’d be losing his touch, and a meeting put off with the Chief was always a problem avoided. His phone rang again. This time his shoulders sagged. He pushed connect. “Anjili. I can explain.”

  “Luc, not glad to hear from me?” Her voice was bubbly. She was playing with him.

  “Of course I am. I was surprised, that’s all.”

  “So what can you explain?”

  “The photo. I was working.” His voice was strained. He didn’t want to have to explain.

  She seemed to sense his anxiety. “Luc, you don’t let me have any fun.”

  “Fun?”

  “I was going to toy with you. Make you squirm a little. How often do I get a chance like this? My man, caught in flagrante delicto. Think of the leverage.”

  Vanier slumped in his chair. “Anjili. I …”

  “Luc. I’m the one who should be sorry. And I am. Sylvie Saint Jacques called this morning. She told me what you were doing. I thought I could have some fun winding you up. That’s all.”

  “Okay. But I was worried.”

  “Don’t
be. We still on for the picnic?”

  “Absolutely. Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Love you, Mr. V.”

  Vanier put the phone down. The day was turning out much better that he could have hoped. He looked over to Saint Jacques and mouthed a thank you.

  Twelve

  Katya woke up after a few hours of deep sleep. She couldn’t remember where she was. She lay still and listened intently, trying to make sense of the noises that filtered through the wooden slats of the shed: cars passing, bicycles, kids shouting and laughing—sounds she hadn’t heard in months. A scuffling noise on the other side of the wooden wall made her freeze. She listened and heard water playing against the wall, more scuffling. When the smell hit her she realized it was a dog relieving itself.

  The darkness of the shed was broken by razor-thin slices of light that pierced the cracks between the wooden slats, turning dust into tiny beads of light. There was enough light to make out some of the contents of the shed: tools hanging on the wall, plastic bags of soil and compost, a manual lawn mower with blades covered in dried grass, columns of old paint cans, the usual collection of buckets that gardeners accumulate. Everything was covered in a thick coat of dust. That made her feel more secure. If the shed wasn’t used that much, maybe she would be safe for a while.

  She convinced herself that her sleeping spot was invisible to anyone standing up inside the shed. To see her, you would have to stoop down and look under the bottom shelf. She felt safe. She pulled her arm up under her head, closed her eyes, and fell asleep again.

  Thirteen

  Diana Prince, the director of Protect, was like a Goth granny. Her hair should have been grey with age, but it was a fierce metallic red, and almost all the visible skin from her neck down was covered in fading tattoos, some professional, others looking like they’d been made by a short-sighted drunk with a toothpick.

  When Saint Jacques called, Prince had refused to meet them at the organization’s offices. They had negotiated a meeting at Prince’s favourite restaurant, a co-op on Ontario Street that specialized in fair-trade organic ancient grains, hand-milled by peasants with stone tools. The dress code seemed to be anything handwoven by poor people. Vanier had eaten lunch there a few times. He liked the food and the beer, but had trouble with the attitude: more self-righteousness per square foot than a born-again Christian convention.